


Everybody Wants to be a Cat

by JessaLRynn



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Awesome Sam, Cursed Castiel, Cursed Dean, Curses, Gen, Humor, Silly, Silly Castiel, Silly Dean, Witchcraft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-20
Updated: 2015-05-20
Packaged: 2018-03-31 12:28:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,966
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3978040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JessaLRynn/pseuds/JessaLRynn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anything could be a cursed object, absolutely anything...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everybody Wants to be a Cat

**Author's Note:**

> So, Misha Collins recently posted a video of him and Jensen Ackles doing something they call "Historical Reenactment". However, they did this completely awesome scene in costume. And, although my brain doesn't move as quickly these days, it still moves.
> 
> Tonight is the Season Finale, and I know it is going to hurt a LOT. So, for the pain, some humor, and for the heartaches, some silliness, and for the angst, some amusement, because Supernatural should also answer to The Storyteller's Creed. Laughter is the cure for sorrow.
> 
> Special thanks to Misha and Jensen for the video, and Jared for the perfect point of view.

Dean ran, a heedless flight at a breakneck pace, tearing through the corridor like hell itself was behind him.  Cas followed, his charge only slightly out of step, pacing Dean but gaining on him.    
  
Dean hit the wall, let out a cry like despair, and bounced a turn like a swimmer - or a comet.  His pivot turned into a return charge, scrabbling and thundering along the path he had just taken.  Again Cas followed, this time passing Dean, who yelled an incomprehensible oath of gibberish at the angel’s back.  
  
Sam just stood in the doorway and tried to pretend he wasn’t watching, but he really, truly couldn’t help it.  It was like an Ed Wood movie, so unbelievably bad that you couldn’t look away in case something worse happened next.  On their third lap, he sighed and decided that nothing was going to change, so he took his book and turned back to his desk.  
  
Dean had been right, something falling off a shelf in the Bunker was bad.  On the other hand, Sam was also right.  So what if it was purple and fuzzy and looked ridiculous?  Just because it was laying on the floor didn’t mean it was a good idea to pick it up.  And it definitely wasn’t smart for your angel to catch it when you got a shock and dropped the thing immediately.  
  
They knew perfectly well that anything - absolutely anything - could be a cursed object.  An enchanted cat toy was just another day at the office for people who’d once had to fight a pair of really tempting ballet shoes.  So now, instead of two Hunters and an Angel living in the Men of Letters Bunker, they seemed to be, at least on a mental level, a Hunter and a pair of people-shaped house cats.  
  
He flipped another page of The Complete Encyclopedia of the Bewitched, Cursed, and Ensorcelled, Volume 3 and 4, Bad Wolf to Caul, wondered idly what Australia was like this time of the year, and let himself sink into his research.  The auditory equivalent of a pair of wild elephants stampeding up and down the corridor was easily ignored.  He turned his iPod up louder just to be sure.  
  
**  
  
Sam only noticed the silence when it was gone.  It had been utterly quiet in the Bunker for a little more than an hour, the flight of the lunatics having ending some fifteen minutes after it started.  And Sam, being the youngest child and fond of dogs, had never encountered the conniving of small children and felines, and therefore had no idea that silence was a very, very bad thing.  
  
He knew now, of course, knew the instant he heard the almighty crash from the kitchen.  Please don’t be dead, he thought wildly, or worse, and peeked around the door frame into Dean’s oft scrubbed little domain.    
  
Cas was sitting on the counter.  Dean, standing next to him with a thoroughly annoyed expression, muttered non-words at Cas, grumbling sounds punctuated by strange little clicks.  Cas acted, for all intents and purposes, like Dean wasn’t there.    
  
As soon as Sam entered the room the whole way, Dean turned toward him, staring, then said, “Sam.”  Sam blinked, shock and excitement both clamoring for his emotions.  Then, his brother walked up to him and, before Sam knew what to make of any of it, rubbed his head all over Sam’s shoulder.  
  
“Uh, hi, Dean,” Sam said, and he was going to keep calm about this if it was the last thing he ever, ever did.  
  
Something fell off the counter.  Sam looked over and saw Castiel admiring his fingers with the full weight of his eerie, angelic focus.  “Sam,” Dean said, butting his head lightly against Sam’s shoulder.  Sam bent down and picked up the can opener from the floor where it had somehow fallen.  “Sam,” Dean added, and followed him down, then up, trying, Sam guessed, to look into his eyes.    
  
The bottle opener that Sam favored when popping open beer bottles tumbled to the floor.  This time, in spite of Dean trying to obstruct his view, Sam had seen Castiel push it off the counter.  “Cas, stop that,” he said, and regretted it almost immediately when Cas turned that laser focus on him.  “Get down,” Sam said, and reached around Dean to pick up the bottle opener.  
  
“Sam,” Dean insisted, “Sam, Sam, Sam, Sam.”  
  
“What?” Sam wondered.  “What?”  
  
“Sam,” Dean explained.  It was, apparently, the only word he knew.  Freaking great.    
  
Sam patted Dean’s head when he bashed it against Sam’s shoulder this time.  Dean beamed at him with an open-faced delight that Sam saw so rarely on his brother, it was almost painful to look at.  He turned instead to Castiel, who had just knocked the can-opener off the counter again.  “Get. Down,” he ordered, and Cas looked him squarely in the eye while knocking a juice glass off instead.  “NOW!” he snapped.  
  
Cas blinked at him, a wide-eyed, innocent look of pure, blue-eyed injury, as he slid slowly from the counter top.  His lip trembled a little, Sam thought, but maybe it was just that Sam had finally met his match in hurt expressions.  “Sam,” Cas said.  Then he walked over and butted his head against Sam’s shoulder, too.  
  
The tall hunter sighed. Not his day.  Not his century.  “Are you hungry?” he offered, tentatively.  
  
Dean started dancing around the room, practically singing the word, “Food.”  So that part, at least, wasn’t particularly different.  
  
**  
  
Sam was in the bathroom for 47 seconds - tops - when he heard them outside.  Cas had, “Sam,” on repeat and Dean was, apparently, scratching at the door.  
  
“Really, guys?” he demanded through the door.  “Five minutes.”  
  
There were a few softer, more frustrated complaints of “Sam,” from both of them, and then silence.  
  
Sam got almost three minutes of quiet.  After that, he just ignored them for the grand prize, because there wasn’t really anything else he could do.  If they were actually dying out there, which the noise they were making suggested that, then they’d just have to do it without him.  
  
When he finally washed his hands and stepped out, they both stared at him as if they’d expected him to escape through the secret passage that they did NOT have in the bathroom.  “Still here,” he said, holding his hands out, QED.  Dean immediately shoved his head under Sam’s left hand.  
  
“Please tell me you won’t need a giant litter box,” Sam suddenly realized.    
  
He could have sworn that Dean rolled his eyes at him over that.  
  
**  
  
“Stop,” Sam ordered.  Nothing.  He reached over and picked up another book from his pile, flipping to the section he’d marked earlier.  “Quit it,” he added.  He read for a few minutes, ears heated, every hair on the back of his neck tingling.  “Seriously, Dean,” he ordered, rounding on his brother and glowering.  
  
Dean was cleaning his fingernails with his teeth, acting like Cas had earlier - like Sam wasn’t even there.  Sam might’ve believed him, except Dean.  So Sam reached over his desk and thumped his brother lightly on the nose.  What Sam didn’t know about cats he made up for in knowing about pets.    
  
Dean hissed and slapped at him with his fingers curled like claws.  Sam was just grateful Dean didn’t actually have any or he’d’ve probably lost the hand. “Jerk,” he muttered, and pointed at the long map table. “Go over there,” he ordered.  
  
Cas, who was snoozing, curled up on the table top, blinked open drowsy blue eyes, then closed them again.  When Dean, looking petulant, climbed up on the table beside him, Cas rubbed his face on Dean’s arm, then left his head there.  Dean wiggled a bit, fidgeted around, and finally settled down when he was practically using Cas for a blanket.    
  
Sam absolutely did not take a picture of them and he definitely didn’t send it to Charlie and Jody.  Sam was a professional.  Well, a professional liar, at any rate.  
  
**  
  
With a violently rude exclamation, Sam slammed the fifth useless text down on his desk, shooting up from his chair in the same gesture.  No one, absolutely no one, ever, needed to know anything about a telephone that had supposedly been cursed to ring at the beginning of every episode of I Love Lucy, especially not when it turned out to just be the first fanboy to ever have a tv and some poor guy’s number.    
  
Unfortunately, he forgot about the two not-cats sleeping on the table.  With a scream like a teenaged banshee, Dean bounced away from the noise, and the table, back against the nearest divider wall, crouched in a defensive position and yowling.  Castiel just vanished.  He didn’t have wings anymore, so it took Sam several seconds to figure out that the angel had darted under the table.  He only found this out, in fact, because he tried to calm Dean by approaching him, and Cas grabbed his ankle.  Sam managed to catch himself before he got toppled like a young oak, but it allowed both of the cursed lunatics all the time they needed to flee in terror.  
  
Sam snatched yet another collection of books off the shelf.  Peace and quiet at last.  He forced himself not to feel the slightest bit guilty about frightening them.  
  
**  
Dean did not need a litter box.  There were still some small miracles available, even to Winchesters.  
  
**  
  
Sam withdrew any hint of a suggestion of even thinking about feeling anything that remotely resembled guilt.  He shoved Dean’s head off the desk instead and moved his book.  Cas, sitting on the floor next to him, pawed quite incessantly at Sam’s left leg.  Dean put his whole arm in the middle of Sam’s book this time.  
  
“Go away,” he ordered, hoping to startle them into hiding again.    
  
They both looked at him as if he was speaking Yiddish, and went right back to what they were doing.    
  
**  
  
Charlie emailed Sam some kind of compendium of cat memes.  He wasn’t sure if she was being helpful or mean.  
  
**  
  
“I can’t find anything,” Sam grumbled in frustration.  He needed another gallon of coffee.  Dean and Cas were getting really good at this “being cats” thing and he’d found nothing about a cursed object that only sort of changed someone, especially not one powerful enough to tinker with a mostly angelic being.  
  
“I can’t do this,” Sam admitted.  He was tired to the soles of his feet, he had forgotten to eat, and it was midnight.  That would have been fine, except Sam was up at 5:30 for his run this morning, and nothing had gone right since then.  “I’m going to bed.”  It wasn’t killing them, after all, so if they were still cats in the morning, there would be more time to research how to make them not cats.  
  
He nearly tripped over both of them on his way to his room, because Cas insisted on walking exactly one and a half paces in front of him and Dean was running in a twisting orbit around the pair of them.  When they got to his door, they both stood there, looking at him with wide, woeful, expectant eyes.  
  
“Not a chance,” Sam grumbled, and shut the door behind himself.  
  
**  
  
He started bolt upright in the middle of the night, his heart attempting to burst free from his chest at the sound of unholy wailing flooding the gloomy dim corridors of the Bunker.  A quick snatch at his gun on the night stand and Sam was standing, listening, silent and intent, for the noise to repeat itself.  
  
Not that it had actually stopped, but it took him a few moments to work all that out.  They were carrying on so much louder than they had all day, a pair of wordless, inarticulate cries in voices like the shriek of a death metal band in a cement truck.    
  
Terrified that the curse had actually reached a terrible, agonizing climax, Sam followed the sounds into the main room, sick to his very soul with worry.  If they were hurting, if they were dying…  the guilt was already starting to set in, dark and familiar.  
  
When Sam finally saw the pair of them, they were sitting there on the desk closest to the telescope, arms around each other’s shoulders without a care in the world.  Relief burnt away all the guilt, but it was a short-lived emotion, almost immediately plowed under by a glacier of icy rage.  “Son of a bitch!” he snapped, and shoved his gun in his waistband.  “What the hell are you two doing?!”  Sam had absolutely no idea how much like Bobby he sounded in that moment.    
  
They kept carrying on and Sam had no idea whether they were ignoring him or not - they were almost insanely loud over there.  “Knock it off!” he shouted, “I didn’t need to wake up to the torture song of your people, dammit!!”  
  
They finally heard him, rounding on him with the weirdest expressions on their faces.  It was eerie, Sam realized, the way they stared at him without blinking in the dimness of only the table lamp.  It wasn’t the way they usually stared at each other, at all, with all the unspoken words and hard-felt feelings.  It was this thoroughly creepy, alien, almost demonic thing.  Sam, who’d looked the Devil in the eyes (and in his own eyes) and told him what to go do with himself, still strongly considered backing away slowly until he could run.    
  
Instead, he just glowered back at them.  “C’mon, guys, I’m trying to get some sleep, here,” he said, as calm as he could manage when he was starting to feel seriously disturbed by the staring.  “Just keep it down.”  
  
They both nodded, still without blinking, and Sam decided to take them at their lack of words and get away from their spooky cat looks before he gave in to the urge to pull out the holy water.  
  
They started up again before he was even halfway down the corridor.  “Really?” Sam demanded of the empty rooms around him and the memories of ghosts.  He shook his head, completely fine now without their crazy looks.  “If you’re doing a freakin’ mating song, just get on with it!” he shouted.  There was an accusing indignation to the silence this time and Sam smirked.    
  
He would’ve been fine, too, if they hadn’t practically bowled him over the second he tried to open his bedroom door.  
  
**  
  
Sleeping might have been easier, Sam decided, if they could just stop trying to sleep on him.  It wasn’t because it was weird, either.  Dean and Cas were just too damn big.  
  
**  
  
Sam had been looking for Dean for over an hour, been through half the rooms and up and down most of the corridors, calling his brother, trying hard to convince himself that freaking out didn’t need to be on today’s agenda.  The only thing - absolutely the only, solitary thing in the whole freaking world right now - that kept him from blind panic and summoning demons, angels, or Waldo to find the lost Hunter was the other slightly catified idiot.  
  
Cas followed after him merrily.  Sometimes, the angel scampered into rooms ahead of Sam to knock things over.  Other times, he charged along in front of Sam, yelling “Dean” at the top of his voice (Cas and Dean both knew two words, as near as Sam could tell - both could say “Sam” and Dean’s other word was, of course, “food”).  Several times, he sat down in the corridor and Sam would back out of an empty room only to nearly fall over Cas’s ridiculousness.  Then, there was the time he laid down in the corridor several feet in front of Sam, rolling around and looking at Sam with a contented smile.  On that occasion, Sam took two steps toward Cas, to see if maybe the angel knew how something as loud and obvious as Dean even could disappear, and Cas jumped to his feet, taking off down the corridor at a dead run.  
  
Sam shook his head.  If he ever got out of this, he decided, they were going to have to wait on him hand and foot for a month to get him to shut up about it.    
  
He stopped at Dean’s door for the sixth or seventh time.  He’d checked in there every time he had been by, on the weird outside chance that Dean had come by and Sam could see a clue as to where he’d gone.  He wearily opened the door again, this time, with a grumbled, “Dean, I swear to God…”  
  
Dean was actually there.  Sam had to look twice to believe it, but there was his brother, sitting on his bed, and trying to get his leg behind his head.  There were some things, Sam decided, that he just didn’t need to see.  At least Dean was still wearing clothes.  
  
Sam snapped a picture of it on his phone.  Dean caught the flash and looked up at him, glowering in baleful fury.  Sam snorted.  “That’s what you get for disappearing, Jerk,” he explained.  
  
“Sam,” Dean replied, and he still managed to say it in the exact tone he would usually have used for “Bitch.”  
  
Cas reappeared, jumped up on the bed beside Dean, and folded himself up like a pretzel.  “I did not need to know that,” Sam informed both of them and, with a single, firm shake of his head, he stepped out of the room, closing the door behind him.  
  
He got almost three yards down the corridor before the pair of them started shrieking like a flock of harpies in a hurricane.  
  
**  
  
Sam had just meant to check on the silence, really.  He didn’t trust them any more, and he definitely didn’t trust them in his room, which was where they were hiding, now.  Dean lolled like a lion on a rock at the edge of Sam’s bed, one arm kept swinging loose and down toward the floor.  He hadn’t known that Cas was under the bed - and Dean obviously hadn’t known, either - until Cas had hissed and slapped at Dean’s hand.  
  
They rolled around in the floor for awhile, chuffing and clicking and muttering at each other in non-words, and Sam couldn’t decide whether it was the funniest thing he’d seen in years, or the most dangerous.  Under all this cursed silliness, after all, Dean was still a trained killer and Cas was still a Heavenly weapon.    
  
“Break it up,” he ordered mildly, and tossed a balled up paper with junked notes on it into the fray.    
  
They knocked the paper around merrily for long enough that Sam got bored watching and threw himself into his bed to read his book.  It was quiet, it was peaceful.  He’d found a fascinating study on the psychology of curse-making.  
  
When Sam next looked up to check the time, he saw that it was after five, closer to six, and his brother and his brother’s angel had been cursed for somewhere around a day and a half.  He also saw that Cas was standing, as still and as strange as always, just outside the door of Sam’s closet.    
  
Whatever Cas was looking at, it wasn’t something Sam could see.  There was absolutely no telling if Cas could see it because he was sort of a cat right now, or because he was an angel usually.  Dean, Sam thought, had vanished again.  
  
There was a slight, soundless movement, as Cas stood in innocent contemplation of the room around him.  Dean, Sam suddenly saw, was hiding in his closet behind the angel, and, as Sam watched, peeked silently out to ascertain Cas’s position.  Sam started to say something.  He really should stop this, because it could get out of hand…  
  
Too late.  While Cas stayed in watchful contemplation of whatever went on beyond human comprehension in a place like this, Dean stuck a hand out, slow, so slow, so very, very careful.  
  
It was a thunderclap, then, the slap to the side of Cas’s head, Dean’s hand like a whip as he pushed his friend to the side.  Cas hissed and rounded on Dean, slapping at him, and diving into the closet after him.    
  
They screeching and wailed and tumbled around in there for a minute, and Sam was too busy laughing at first to remember that was his closet they were probably tearing up.   It was only the rattle of several hangars falling, followed by the door getting kicked out of its track that reminded him.    
  
Sam slammed his book shut, shaking his head, suddenly just so done with this. “That is enough,” he snapped.  They ignored him.  He pulled open the closet door, and they stared up at him like he’d caught them in the clench, then straightened up like they hadn’t been doing anything at all.  
  
Sam rolled his eyes, fed up to his ears.  He didn’t even like cats, anyway.  “Come on,” he ordered, “now!”  
  
**  
  
Sam ended up practically dragging Dean and Cas into the Letter’s shower room.  He grabbed the duck tape from the cabinet on his way and, when he got there, he taped out two large, silver gray squares on the floor.  
  
“You’re cats, right?” he said.  “So, boxes are cat traps.”  He’d had that from Charlie’s memes - several pictures of ‘if I fitz, I sitz’.  “So, there you go.”  He shoved Cas toward one of the squares and pushed Dean firmly into the other.  
  
They glared at Sam for several minutes but, weirdly, they didn’t seem to be inclined to get out of the squares he’d taped on the floor for them.  Huh.  
  
“Should’ve thought of this yesterday,” Sam said.  While he was at it, he grabbed the latex cleaning gloves from the cabinet so he could check on the cursed cat toy for any more clues.    
  
If he couldn’t get them back to normal tomorrow, Sam decided, he would call Charlie and tell her it was her turn.  
  
**  
  
In the box that had once contained a deceptively fuzzy and purple cat toy was a short note.  The note, written in a sharp but exact hand said a lot in so very few words, the precise elegance of Carl Sandberg’s descriptive poem, “ _Fog_ ”.  
  
Sam stared at it, turned it over, put it back in the box, took it out, read it again.  
  
“Hey, Sammy,” said Dean, “what’s with the duck tape in the shower room, man?”  
  
“‘ _The fog comes on little cats’ feet_ ,’” Sam quoted, realizing.    
  
Castiel, wandering up next to Dean, nodded.  “Carl Sandburg,” he said.  
  
“Oh.  Kay,” Dean agreed, in a tone of voice like they were both insane.  They were - anybody who voluntarily became a Hunter probably was - but he was crazier than both of them put together, so what did Sam have to worry about there?    
  
“It’s the key to the spell, Dean,” Sam explained.    
  
“What spell?” Dean said, and he reached up and felt Sam’s head, like a mother expecting to find a feverish ten year old.  Sadly, Sam had to admit that the last time Dean had done that was much more recently.  
  
“‘ _The fog comes on little cat feet_ ,’” Castiel quoted, his grim, dark voice lending a profound weight to the simple poem.  “‘ _It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on._ ’”  
  
“Yes, that,” said Sam, urgently.  
  
“Hey,” said Dean, looking at a box on the shelf behind Sam, “what’s this?”  
  
Sam closed his eyes.  “Please don’t touch it,” he begged.  
  
Dean grinned at him, then winked.  “Just messing with you, Sammy,” he said.  
  
“You know what?” Sam decided, “I’m posting the video.”  
  
And he left them standing there, staring after him, and probably wondering just what [video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqAcBYUgkFM) he had in mind.  


**Author's Note:**

> You can see the video in question here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqAcBYUgkFM


End file.
